Babel Of Modern Thought

O ye Lords of Truth who are
cycling in eternity . . . save me from the annihilation in this Region of the
Two Truths. Egyptian Ritual of the Dead

I

THAT the world moves in cycles,
and events repeat themselves therein, is an old, yet ever new truism. It is new
to most, firstly, because it belongs to a distinct group of occult aphorisms in
partibus infidelium, and our present-day Rabbis and Pharisees will accept
nothing coming from that Nazareth; secondly, because those who will swallow a
camel of whatever size, provided it hails from orthodox or accepted
authorities, will strain and kick at the smallest gnat, if only its buzz comes
from theosophical regions. Yet this proposition about the world cycles and
ever-recurring events, is a very correct one. It is one, moreover, that people
could easily verify for themselves. Of course, the people meant here are men
who do their own thinking; not those others who are satisfied to remain, from
birth till death, pinned, like a thistle fastened to the coat-tail of a country
parson, to the beliefs and thoughts of the goody-goody majority.

We cannot agree with a writer
(was it Gilpin?) who said that the grandest truths are often rejected, not so
much for want of direct evidence, as for want of inclination to search for it.
This applies but to a few. Nine-tenths of the people will reject the most
overwhelming evidence, even if it be brought to them without any trouble to
themselves, only because it happens to clash with their personal interests or
prejudices; especially if it comes from unpopular quarters. We are living in a
highly moral atmosphere, high sounding in words. Put to the test of practice,
however, the morality of this age in point of genuineness and reality is of the
nature of the black skin of the negro minstrel: assumed for show and pay, and
washed off at the close of every performance. In sober truth, our opponents
advocates of official science, defenders of orthodox religion, and the tutti
quanti of the detractors of Theosophy who claim to oppose our works on grounds
of scientific evidence, public good and truth, strongly resemble advocates in
our courts of law miscalled of justice. These in their defence of robbers and
murderers, forgers and adulterers, deem it to be their duty to browbeat,
confuse and bespatter all who bear witness against their clients, and will
ignore, or if possible, suppress, all evidence which goes to incriminate them.
Let ancient Wisdom step into the witness-box herself, and prove that the goods
found in the possession of the prisoner at the bar, were taken from her own
strong-box; and she will find herself accused of all manner of crimes,
fortunate if she escape being branded as a common fraud, and told that she is
no better than she should be.

What member of our Society can
wonder then, that in this our age, pre-eminently one of shams and shows, the
theosophists’ teachings so (mis-) called, seem to
be the most unpopular of all the systems now to the fore; or that materialism
and theology, science and modern philosophy, have arrayed themselves in holy
alliance against theosophical studies perhaps because all the former are based
on chips and broken-up fragments of that primordial system. Cotton complains somewhere,
that the metaphysicians have been learning their lesson for the last four (?)
thousand years, and that it is now high time that they should begin to teach
something. But, no sooner is the possibility of such studies offered, with the
complete evidence into the bargain that they belong to the oldest doctrine of
the metaphysical philosophy of mankind, than, instead of giving them a fair
hearing at least, the majority of the complainers turn away with a sneer and
the cool remark: Oh, you must have invented all you say yourself!

Dear ladies and gentlemen, has
it ever occurred to you, how truly grand and almost divine would be that man or
woman, who, at this time of the life of mankind, could invent anything, or
discover that which had not been invented and known ages before? The charge of
being such an inventor would only entitle the accused to the choicest honours.
For show us, if you can, that mortal who in the historical cycle of our human
race has taught the world something entirely new. To the proud pretensions of
this age, Occultism the real Eastern Occultism, or the so-called Esoteric
Doctrine answers through its ablest students: Indeed all your boasted knowledge
is but the reflex action of the by-gone Past. At best, you are but the modern
popularisers of very ancient ideas. Consciously and unconsciously you have
pilfered from old classics and philosophers, who were themselves but the
superficial recorders cautious and incomplete, owing to the terrible penalties
for divulging the secrets of initiation taught during the mysteries of the
primæval Wisdom. Avaunt! your modern. sciences and speculations are but the
réchauffé dishes of antiquity; the dead bones (served with a sauce piquante of
crass materialism, to disguise them) of the intellectual repasts of the gods.
Ragonwas right in saying in his Maçonnerie Occulte, that Humanity only seems to
progress in achieving one discovery after the other, a sin truth, it only finds
that which it had lost. Most of our modern inventions for which we claim such
glory, are, after all, things people were acquainted with three and four
thousand years back.1 Lost to us through wars, floods and fire, their very
existence became obliterated from the memory of man. And now modern thinkers
begin to rediscover them once more.

Allow us to recapitulate a few
of such things and thus refresh your memory.

Deny, if you can, that the
most important of our present sciences were known to the ancients. It is not
Eastern literature only, and the whole cycle of those esoteric teachings which
an overzealous Christian Kabalist, in France, has just dubbed the accursed
sciences that will give you a flat denial, but profane classical literature, as
well. The proof is easy.

Are not physics and natural
sciences but an amplified reproduction of the works of Anaxagoras, of
Empedocles, Democritus and others? All that is taught now, was taught by these
philosophers then. For they maintained even in the fragments of their works
still extant that the Universe is composed of eternal atoms which, moved by a
subtle internal Fire, combine in millions of various ways. With them, this Fire
was the divine Breath of the Universal Mind, but now, it has become with the
modern philosophers no better than a blind and senseless Force. Furthermore
they taught that there was neither Life nor Death, but only a constant
destruction of form, produced by perpetual physical transformations. This has
now become by intellectual transformation, that which is known as the physical
correlation of forces, conservation of energy, law of continuity, and what not,
in the vocabulary of modern Science. But what’s in a
name, or in new-fangled words and compound terms, once that the identity of the
essential ideas is established?

Was not Descartes indebted for
his original theories to the old Masters, to Leucippus and Democritus,
Lucretius, Anaxagoras and Epicurus? These taught that the celestial bodies were
formed of a multitude of atoms, whose vortical motion existed from eternity;
which met, and, rotating together, the heaviest were drawn to the centres, the
lightest to the circumferences; each of these concretions was carried away in a
fluidic matter, which, receiving from this rotation an impulse, the stronger
communicated it to the weaker concretions. This seems a tolerably close description
of the Cartesian theory of Elemental Vortices taken from Anaxagoras and some
others; and it does look most suspiciously like the vortical atoms of Sir W.
Thomson!

Even Sir Isaac Newton, the
greatest among the great, is found constantly mirroring a dozen or so of old
philosophers. In reading his works one sees floating in the air the pale images
of the same Anaxagoras and Democritus, of Pythagoras, Aristotle, Timæus of
Locris, Lucretius, Macrobius, and even our old friend Plutarch. All these have maintained
one or the other of these propositions, (1) that the smallest of the particles
of matter would be sufficient owing to its infinite divisibility to fill
infinite space; (2) that there exist two Forces emanated from the Universal
Soul, combined in numerical proportions (the centripetal and centrifugal
forces, of the latter day scientific saints); (3) that there was a mutual
attraction of bodies, which attraction causes the latter to, what we now call,
gravitate and keeps them within their respective spheres; (4) they hinted most
unmistakably at the relation existing between the weight and the density, or
the quantity of matter contained in a unit of mass; and (5) taught that the
attraction (gravitation) of the planets toward the Sun is in reciprocal proportion
to their distance from that luminary.

Finally, is it not a
historical fact that the rotation of the Earth and the heliocentric system were
taught by Pythagoras not to speak of Hicetas, Heraclides, Ecphantus,
&c.,--over 2,000 years before the despairing and now famous cry of Galileo,
E pur, se muove? Did not the priests of Etruria and the Indian Rishis still
earlier, know how to attract lightning, ages upon ages before even the astral
Sir B. Franklin was formed in space? Euclid is honoured to this day perhaps,
because one cannot juggle as easily with mathematics and figures, as with
symbols and words bearing on unprovable hypotheses. Archimedes had probably
forgotten more in his day, than our modern mathematicians, astronomers,
geometricians, mechanicians, hydrostaticians and opticians ever knew. Without
Archytas, the disciple of Pythagoras, the application of the theory of
mathematics to practical purposes would, perchance, remain still unknown to our
grand era of inventions and machinery. Needless to remind the reader of that
which the Aryans knew, as it is already recorded in the Theosophist and other
works obtainable in India.

Wise was Solomon in saying
that there is no new thing under the Sun; and that everything that is hath been
already of old time, which was before us save, perhaps, the theosophical
doctrines which the humble writer of the present is charged by some with having
invented. The prime origin of this (very complimentary) accusation is due to
the kind efforts of the S. P. R. It is the more considerate and kind of this
world famous, and learned Society of Researches, as its scribes seem utterly
incapable of inventing anything original themselves even in the way of
manufacturing a commonplace illustration. If the inquisitive reader turns to
the article which follows, he will have the satisfaction of finding a curious
proof of this fact, in a reprint from old Izaak Walton’s
Lives, which our contributor has entitled Mrs. Donne’s
Astral Body. Thus even the scientifically accurate Cambridge Dons are not, it
seems, above borrowing from an ancient book; and not only fail to acknowledge
the debt, but even go to the trouble of presenting it to the public as new
original matter, without even the compliment of inverted commas. And thus all
along.

In short, it may be said of
the scientific theories, that those which are true are not new; and those which
are new are not true, or are at least, very dubious. It is easy to hide behind
merely working hypotheses, but less easy to maintain their plausibility in the
face of logic and philosophy. To make short work of a very big subject, we have
but to institute a brief comparison between the old and the new teachings. That
which modern science would make us believe, is this: the atoms possess innate
and immutable properties. That which Esoteric, and also exoteric, Eastern
philosophy calls divine Spirit Substance (Purusha Prakriti) or eternal
Spirit-matter, one inseparable from the other, modern Science calls Force and
Matter, adding as we do (for it is a Vedantic conception), that, the two being
inseparable, matter is but an abstraction (an illusion rather). The properties
of matter are, by the Eastern Occultists, summed up in, or brought down to,
attraction and repulsion; by the Scientists, to gravitation and affinities.
According to this teaching, the properties of complex combinations are but the
necessary results of the composition of elementary properties; the most complex
existences being the physico-chemical automata, called men. Matter from being
primarily scattered and inanimate, begets life, sensation, emotions and will,
after a whole series of consecutive gropings. The latter non-felicitous
expression (belonging to Mr. Tyndall), forced the philosophical writer,
Delboeuf2, to criticize the English Scientist in very disrespectful terms, and
forces us in our turn, to agree with the former. Matter, or anything equally
conditioned, once that it is declared to be subject to immutable laws, cannot
grope. But this is a trifle when compared with dead or inanimate matter,
producing life, and even psychic phenomena of the highest mentality! Finally, a
rigid determinism reigns over all nature. All that which has once happened to
our automatical Universe, had to happen, as the future of that Universe is
traced in the smallest of its particles or atoms. Return these atoms, they say,
to the same position and order they were in at the first moment of the
evolution of the physical Kosmos, and the same universal phenomena will be
repeated in precisely the same order, and the Universe will once more return to
its present conditions. To this, logic and philosophy answer that it cannot be
so, as the properties of the particles vary and are changeable. If the atoms
are eternal and matter indestructible, these atoms can never have been born;
hence, they can have nothing innate in them. Theirs is the one homogeneous (and
we add divine) substance, while compound molecules receive their properties, at
the beginning of the life cycles or manvantaras, from within without. Organisms
cannot have been developed from dead or inanimate matter, as, firstly, such
matter does not exist, and secondly, philosophy proving it conclusively, the
Universe is not subjected to fatality. As Occult Science teaches that the
universal process of differentiation begins anew after every period of
Maha-pralaya, there is no reason to think that it would slavishly and blindly
repeat itself. Immutable laws last only from the incipient to the last stage of
the universal life, being simply the effects of primordial, intelligent and
entirely free action. For Theosophists, as also for Dr. Pirogoff, Delboeuf and
many a great independent modern thinker, it is the Universal (and to us
impersonal because infinite) Mind, which is the true and primordial Demiurge.

What better illustrates the
theory of cycles, than the following fact? Nearly 700 years B.C., in the
schools of Thales and Pythagoras, was taught the doctrine of the true motion of
the earth, its form and the whole heliocentric system. And in 317 A.D.
Lactantius, the preceptor of Crispus Cæsar, the son of the Emperor Constantine,
is found teaching his pupil that the earth was a plane surrounded by the sky,
itself composed of fire and water! Moreover, the venerable Church Father warned
his pupil against the heretical doctrine of the earth’s
globular form, as the Cambridge and Oxford Father Dons warn their students now,
against the pernicious and superstitious doctrines of Theosophy such as
Universal Mind, Re-incarnation and so on. There is a resolution tacitly accepted
by the members of the T. S. for the adoption of a proverb of King Solomon,
paraphrased for our daily use: A scientist is wiser in his own conceit than
seven Theosophists that can render a reason. No time, therefore, should be lost
in arguing with them; but no endeavour, on the other hand, should be neglected
to show up their mistakes and blunders. The scientific conceit of the
Orientalists especially of the youngest branch of these the Assyriologists and
the Egyptologists is indeed phenomenal. Hitherto, some credit was given to the
ancients to their philosophers and Initiates, at any rate of knowing a few
things that the moderns could not rediscover. But now even the greatest
Initiates are represented to the public as fools. Here is an instance. On pages
15, 16 and 17 (Introduction) in the Hibbert Lectures of 1887 by Prof. Sayce, on
The Ancient Babylonians, the reader is brought face to face with a conundrum
that may well stagger the unsophisticated admirer of modern learning.
Complaining of the difficulties and obstacles that meet the Assyriologist at
every step of his studies; after giving the dreary catalogue of the formidable
struggles of the interpreter to make sense of the inscriptions from broken
fragments of clay tiles; the Professor goes on to confess that the scholar who
has to read these cuneiform characters, is often likely to put a false
construction upon isolated passages, the context of which must be supplied from
conjecture (p. 14). Notwithstanding all this, the learned lecturer places the modern
Assyriologist higher than the ancient Babylonian Initiate, in the knowledge of
symbols and his own religion!

The passage deserves to be
quoted in toto:

It is true that many of the
sacred texts were so written as to be intelligible only to the initiated; but
the initiated were provided with keys and glosses, many of which are in our
hands(?) . . . We can penetrate into the real meaning of documents which to him
(the ordinary Babylonian) were a sealed book. Nay, more than this, the
researches that have been made during the last half-century into the creed and
beliefs of the nations of the world both past and present, have given us a clue
to the interpretation of these documents which even the initiated priests did
not possess.

The above (the italics being our
own) may be better appreciated when thrown into a syllogistic form.

Major premise: The ancient
Initiates had keys and glosses to their esoteric texts, of which they were the
INVENTORS.

Minor premise: Our
Orientalists have many of these keys.

Conclusion: Ergo, the
Orientalists have a clue which the Initiates themselves did not possess!!

Into what were the Initiates,
in such a case, initiated?--and who invented the blinds, we ask.

Few Orientalists could answer
this query. We are more generous, however; and may show in our next that, into
which our modest Orientalists have never yet been initiated all their alleged
clues to the contrary.

II

Go to, let

us go down and there confound
their

language that

they may not understand

one another’s

speech . . .Genesis

HAVING done with modern
physical Sciences we next turn to Western philosophies and religions. Every one
of these is equally based upon, and derives its theories and doctrines from
heathen, and moreover, exoteric thought. This can easily be traced from
Schopenhauer and Mr. Herbert Spencer, down to Hypnotism and so-called Mental
Science. The German philosophers modernize Buddhism; the English are inspired
by Vedantism; while the French, borrowing from both, add to them Plato, in a
Phrygian cap, and occasionally, as with Auguste Comte, the weird sex-worship or
Mariolatry of the old Roman Catholic ecstatics and visionaries. New systems,
yclept philosophical, new sects and societies, spring up now-a-days in every
corner of our civilized lands. But even the highest among them agree on no one
point, though each claims supremacy. This, because no science, no philosophy
being at best, but a fragment broken from the WISDOM RELIGION can stand alone,
or be complete in itself. Truth, to be complete, must represent an unbroken
continuity. It must have no gaps, no missing links. And which of our modern
religions, sciences or philosophies, is free from such defects? Truth is One.
Even as the palest reflection of the Absolute, it can be no more dual than is
absoluteness itself, nor can it have two aspects. But such truth is not for the
majorities, in our world of illusion especially for those minds which are
devoid of the noëtic element. These have to substitute for the high spiritual
and quasi absolute truth the relative one, which having two sides or aspects,
both conditioned by appearances, lead our brain-minds one to intellectual
scientific materialism, the other to materialistic or anthropomorphic
religiosity. But even that kind of truth, in order to offer a coherent and
complete system of something, has, while naturally clashing with its opposite,
to offer no gaps and contradictions, no broken or missing links, in the special
system or doctrine it undertakes to represent.

And here a slight digression
must come in. We are sure to be told by some, that this is precisely the
objection taken to theosophical expositions, from Isis Unveiled down to the
Secret Doctrine. Agreed. We are quite prepared to confess that the latter work,
especially, surpasses in these defects all the other theosophical works. We are
quite ready to admit the faults charged against it by its critics that it is
badly arranged, discursive, over-burdened with digressions into by-ways of
mythology, etc., etc. But then it is neither a philosophical system nor the
Doctrine, called secret or esoteric, but only a record of a few of its facts
and a witness to it. It has never claimed to be the full exposition of the
system (it advocates) in its totality; (a) because as the writer does not boast
of being a great Initiate, she could, therefore, never have undertaken such a
gigantic task; and (b) because had she been one, she would have divulged still
less. It has never been contemplated to make of the sacred truths an integral
system for the ribaldry and sneers of a profane and iconoclastic public. The
work does not pretend to set up a series of explanations, complete in all their
details, of the mysteries of Being; nor does it seek to win for itself the name
of a distinct system of thought like the works of Messrs. Herbert Spencer,
Schopenhauer or Comte. On the contrary, the Secret Doctrine merely asserts that
a system, known as the WISDOM RELIGION, the work of generations of adepts and
seers, the sacred heirloom of pre-historic times actually exists, though
hitherto preserved in the greatest secrecy by the present Initiates; and it
points to various corroborations of its existence to this very day, to be found
in ancient and modern works. Giving a few fragments only, it there shows how
these explain the religious dogmas of the present day, and how they might serve
Western religions, philosophies and science, as sign-posts along the untrodden
paths of discovery. The work is essentially fragmentary, giving statements of
sundry facts taught in the esoteric schools kept, so far, secret by which the
ancient symbolism of various nations is interpreted. It does not even give the
keys to it, but merely opens a few of the hitherto secret drawers. No new
philosophy is set up in the Secret Doctrine, only the hidden meaning of some of
the religious allegories of antiquity is given, light being thrown on these by
the esoteric sciences, and the common source is pointed out, whence all the
world-religions and philosophies have sprung. Its chief attempt is to show,
that however divergent the respective doctrines and systems of old may seem on
their external or objective side, the agreement between all becomes perfect, so
soon as the esoteric or inner side of these beliefs and their symbology is
examined and a careful comparison made. It is also maintained that its
doctrines and sciences, which form an integral cycle of universal cosmic facts
and metaphysical axioms and truths, represent a complete and unbroken system;
and that he who is brave and persevering enough, ready to crush the animal in
himself, and forgetting the human self, sacrifices it to his Higher Ego, can
always find his way to become initiated into these mysteries. This is all the
Secret Doctrine claims. Are not a few facts and self-evident truths, found in
these volumes all the literary defects of the exposition
notwithstanding,--truths already proved practically to some, better than the
most ingenious working hypotheses, liable to be upset any day, than the
unexplainable mysteries of religious dogmas, or the most seemingly profound
philosophical speculations? Can the grandest among ‘ these
speculations be really profound, when from their Alpha to their Omega they are
limited and conditioned by their author’s
brain-mind, hence dwarfed and crippled on that Procrustean bed, cut down to fit
limited sensuous perceptions which will not allow the intellect to go beyond
their enchanted circle? No philosopher who views the spiritual realm as a mere
figment of superstition, and regards man’s
mental perceptions as simply the result of the organization of the brain, can
ever be worthy of that name.

Nor has a materialist any
right to the appellation, since it means a lover of Wisdom, and Pythagoras, who
was the first to coin the compound term, never limited Wisdom to this earth.
One who affirms that the Universe and Man are objects of the senses only, and
who fatally chains thought within the region of senseless matter, as do the
Darwinian evolutionists, is at best a sophiaphobe when not a philosophaster
never a philosopher.

Therefore is it that in this
age of Materialism, Agnosticism, Evolutionism, and false Idealism, there is not
a system, however intellectually expounded, that can stand on its own legs, or
fail to be criticized by an exponent from another school of thought as materialistic
as itself; even Mr. Herbert Spencer, the greatest of all, is unable to answer
some criticisms. Many are those who remember the fierce polemics that raged a
few years ago in the English and American journals between the Evolutionists on
the one hand and the Positivists on the other. The subject of the dispute was
with regard to the attitude and relation that the theory of evolution would
bear to religion. Mr. F. Harrison, the Apostle of Positivism, charged Mr.
Herbert Spencer with restricting religion to the realm of reason, forgetting
that feeling and not the cognizing faculty, played the most important part in
it. The erroneousness and insufficiency of the ideas on the Unknowable as
developed in Mr. Spencer’s works were also taken to task by Mr.
Harrison. The idea was erroneous, he held, be cause it was based on the
acceptation of the metaphysical absolute. It was insufficient, he argued,
because it brought deity down to an empty abstraction, void of any meaning.3 To
this the great English writer replied, that he had never thought of offering
his Unknowable and Incognizable, as a subject for religious worship. Then
stepped into the arena, the respective admirers and defenders of Messrs.
Spencer and Harrison, some defending the material metaphysics of the former
thinker (if we may be permitted to use this paradoxical yet correct definition
of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s philosophy), others, the arguments
of the Godless and Christless Roman Catholicism of Auguste Comte,4 both sides
giving and receiving very hard blows. Thus, Count d’Alviella
of Brussels,5 suddenly discovered in Mr. H. Spencer a kind of hidden, yet
reverential Theist, and compared Mr. Harrison to a casuist of mediæval
Scholasticism.

It is not to discuss the
relative merits of materialistic Evolutionism, or of Positivism either, that
the two English thinkers are brought forward; but simply to point, as an
illustration, to the Babel-like confusion of modern thought. While the
Evolutionists (of Herbert Spencer’s
school) maintain that the historical evolution of the religious feeling
consists in the constant abstraction of the attributes of Deity, and their
final separation from the primitive concrete conceptions this process rejoicing
in the easy-going triple compound of deanthropomorphization, or the
disappearance of human attributes the Comtists on their side hold to another
version. They affirm that fetishism, or the direct worship of nature, was the
primitive religion of man, a too protracted-evolution alone having landed it in
anthropomorphism. Their Deity is Humanity and the God they worship, Mankind, as
far as we understand them. The only way, therefore, of settling the dispute, is
to ascertain which of the two philosophical and scientific theories, is the
less pernicious and the more probable. Is it true to say, as d’Alviella
assures us, that Mr. Spencer’s Unknowable contains all the
elements necessary to religion; and, as that remarkable writer is alleged to
imply, that religious feeling tends to free itself from every moral element;
or, shall we accept the other extremity and agree with the Comtists, that
gradually, religion will blend itself with, merge into, and disappear in
altruism and its service to Humanity?

Useless to say that Theosophy,
while rejecting the one-sided-ness and therefore the limitation in both ideas,
is alone able to reconcile the two, i.e., the Evolutionists and the Positivists
on both metaphysical and practical lines. How to do this it is no there the
place to say, as every Theosophist acquainted with the main tenets of the
Esoteric Philosophy can do it for himself. We believe in an impersonal
Unknowable and know well that the ABSOLUTE, or Absoluteness, can have nought to
do with worship on anthropomorphic lines; Theosophy rejects the Spencerian He
and substitutes the impersonal IT for the personal pronoun, whenever speaking
of the Absolute and the Unknowable. And it teaches, as foremost of all virtues,
altruism and self-sacrifice, brotherhood and compassion for every living
creature, without, for all that, worshipping Man or Humanity. In the
Positivist, more-over, who admits of no immortal soul in men, believes in no
future life or reincarnation, such a worship becomes worse than fetishism: it
is Zoolatry, the worship of the animals. For that alone which constitutes the
real Man is, in the words of Carlyle, the essence of our being, the mystery in
us that calls itself ‘I’-- . .
. a breath of Heaven; the Highest Being reveals himself in man. This denied,
man is but an animal the shame and scandal of the Universe, as Pascal puts it.

It is the old, old story, the
struggle of matter and spirit, the survival of the unfittest, because of the
strongest and most material. But the period when nascent Humanity, following
the law of the natural and dual evolution, was descending along with spirit
into matter is closed. We (Humanity) are now helping matter to ascend toward
spirit; and to do that we have to help substance to disenthral itself from the
viscous grip of sense. We, of the fifth Root Race, are the direct descendants
of the primeval Humanity of that Race; those, who on this side of the Flood
tried, by commemorating it, to save the antediluvian Truth and Wisdom, and were
worsted in our efforts by the dark genius of the Earth the spirit of matter,
whom the Gnostics called Ildabaoth and the Jews Jehovah. Think ye, that even
the Bible of Moses, the book you know so well and understand so badly, has left
this claim of the Ancient Doctrine without witness? It has not. Allow us to
close with a (to you) familiar passage, only interpreted in its true light.

In the beginning of time, or
rather, in the childhood of the fifth Race, the whole earth was of one lip and
of one speech, saith chapter XI of Genesis. Read esoterically, this means that
mankind had one universal doctrine, a philosophy, common to all; and that men
were bound by one religion, whether this term be derived from the Latin word
relegere, to gather, or be united in speech or in thought, from religens,
revering the gods, or, from religare, to be bound fast together. Take it one
way or the other, it means most undeniably and plainly that our forefathers
from beyond the flood accepted in common one truth i.e., they believed in that
aggregate of subjective and objective facts which form the consistent, logical
and harmonious whole called by us the Wisdom Religion.

Now, reading the first nine
verses of chapter XI between the lines, we get the following information. Wise
in their generation, our early fathers were evidently acquainted with the
imperishable truism which teaches that in union alone lies strength in union of
thought as well as in that of nations, of course. Therefore, lest in disunion
they should be scattered upon the face of the earth, and their Wisdom-religion
should, in consequence, be broken up into a thousand fragments; and lest they,
themselves, instead of towering as hitherto, through knowledge, heavenward,
should, through blind faith begin gravitating earthward the wise men, who
journeyed from the East, devised a plan. In those days temples were sites of
learning, not of superstition; priests taught divine Wisdom, not man-invented
dogmas, and the ultima thule of their religious activity did not centre in the
contribution box, as at present. Thus ’Go to,’
they said, ‘let us build a city and a tower,
whose top may reach unto heaven, and let us make a name.’ And
they made burnt brick and used it for stone, and built therewith a city and a
tower.

So far, this is a very old
story, known as well to a Sunday school ragamuffin as to Mr. Gladstone. Both believe
very sincerely that these descendants of the accursed Ham were proud sinners
whose object was like that of the Titans, to insult and dethrone Zeus-Jehovah,
by reaching heaven, the supposed abode of both. But since we find the story
told in the revealed6 Scripts, it must, like all the rest in them, have its
esoteric interpretation. In this, Occult symbolism will help us. All the
expressions that we have italicized, when read in the original Hebrew and
according to the canons of esoteric symbolism, will yield quite a different
construction. Thus:

1.And the whole earth (mankind),
was of one lip (i.e., proclaimed the same teachings) and of the same words not
of speech as in the authorized version.

Now the Kabalistic meaning of
the term words and word may be found in the Zohar and also in the Talmud. Words
(Dabarim) mean powers, and word, in the singular, is a synonym of Wisdom; e.g.,
By the uttering of ten words was the world created--(Talmud Pirkey Aboth c. 5.,
Mish. I). Herethe words refer to the ten Sephiroth, Builders of the Universe.
Again: By the Word, (Wisdom, Logos) of YHVH were the Heavens made (ibid.).

2-4. And the man7 (the chief
leader) said to his neighbour, ‘Go to,
let us make bricks (disciples) and burn them to a burning (initiate, fill them
with sacred fire), let us build us a city (establish mysteries and teach the
Doctrine8) and a tower (Ziggurrat, a sacred temple tower) whose top may reach
unto heaven’(the highest limit reachable in space). The great tower of Nebo, of Nabi
on the temple of Bel, was called the house of the seven spheres of heaven and
earth, and the house of the stronghold (or strength, tagimut) and the
foundation stone of heaven and earth.

Occult symbology teaches, that
to burn bricks for a city means to train disciples for magic, a hewn stone
signifying a full Initiate, Petra the Greek and Kephas the Aramaic word for
stone, having the same meaning, viz., interpreter of the Mysteries, a
Hierophant. The supreme initiation was referred to as the burning with great
burning. Thus, the bricks are fallen, but we will build (anew) with hewn stones
of Isaiah becomes clear. For the true interpretation of the four last verses of
the genetic allegory about the supposed confusion of tongues we may turn to the
legendary version of the Yezidis and read verses 5, 6, 7, and 8 in Genesis, ch.
xi, esoterically:

And Adonai (the Lord) came
down and said: ‘Behold, the people is one (the people
are united in thought and deed) and they have one lip (doctrine).’
And now they begin to spread it and ‘nothing
will be restrained from them (they will have full magic powers and get all they
want by such power, Kriyasakti,) that they have imagined’.

And now what are the Yezidis
and their version and what is Ad-onai? Ad is the Lord, their ancestral god; and
the Yezidis are a heretical Mussulman sect, scattered over Armenia, Syria, and
especially Mosul, the very site of Babel (see Chaldean Account of Genesis), who
are known under the strange name of Devil-worshippers. Their confession of
faith is very original. They recognize two powers or gods Allah and Ad, (or
Adonai) but identify the latter with Sheitân or Satan. This is but natural
since Satan is also a son of god9 (see Job I). As stated in the Hibbert
Lectures (pp. 346 and 347), Satan the Adversary, was the minister and angel of
God. Hence, when questioned on the cause of their curious worship of one who
has become the embodiment of Evil and the dark spirit of the Earth, they
explain the reason in a most logical, if irreverent, manner. They tell you that
Allah, being All-good, would not harm the smallest of his creatures. Ergo, has
he no need of prayers, or burnt-offerings of the firstlings of the flock and
the fat thereof. But that their Ad, or the Devil, being All-bad, cruel,
jealous, revengeful and proud, they have, in self-preservation, to propitiate
him with sacrifices and burnt offerings smelling sweet in his nostrils, and to
coax and flatter him. Ask any Sheik of the Yezidis of Mosul what they have to
say, as to the confusion of tongues, or speech when Allah came down to see the
city and the tower which the children of men had builded; and they will tell
you it is not Allah but Ad, the god Sheitan, who did it. The jealous genius of
the earth became envious of the powers and sanctity of men (as the god Vishnu
becomes jealous of the great powers of the Yogis, even when they were Daityas);
and therefore this deity of matter and concupiscence confused their brains,
tempted and made the Builders fall into his nets; and thus, having lost their
purity, they lost therewith their knowledge and magic powers, intermarried and
became scattered upon the face of the earth.

This is more logical than to
attribute to one’s God, the All-good, such ungodly
tricks as are fathered upon him in the Bible. Moreover, the legend about the
tower of Babel and the confusion of speech, is like much else, not original,
but comes from the Chaldeans and Babylonians. George Smith found the version on
a mutilated fragment of the Assyrian tablets, though there is nothing said in
it about the confusion of speech. I have translated the word ‘speech’
with a prejudice, he says (Chaldean account of Genesis, p. 163), I have never
seen the Assyrian word with this meaning. Anyone who reads for himself the
fragmentary translation by G. Smith, on pages 160-163 in the volume cited, will
find the version much nearer to that of the Yezidis than to the version of
Genesis. It is he, whose heart was evil and who was wicked, who confused their
counsel, not their speech, and who broke the Sanctuary . . . which carried
Wisdom, and bitterly they wept at Babel.

And so ought to weep all the
philosophers and lovers of Ancient Wisdom; for it is since then that the
thousand and one exoteric substitutes for the one true Doctrine or lip had
their beginning, obscuring more and more the intellects of men, and shedding
innocent blood in fierce fanaticism. Had our modern philosophers studied,
instead of sneering at, the old Books of Wisdom say the Kabala they would have
found that which would have unveiled to them many a secret of ancient Church
and State. As they have not, however, the result is evident. The dark cycle of
Kali Yug has brought back a Babel of modern thought, compared with which the
confusion of tongues itself appears a harmony. All is dark and uncertain; no
argument in any department, neither in sciences, philosophy, law, nor even in
religion. But, woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put
darkness for light, and light for darkness, saith Isaiah. The very elements
seem confused and climates shift, as if the celestial upper ten themselves had
lost their heads. All one can do is to sit still and look on, sad and resigned,
while

The slack sail shifts from
side to side;

The boat untrimm’d
admits the tide;

Borne down adrift, at random
toss’d,

The oar breaks short, . . .
the rudder’s lost

Lucifer, January, February,
1891

1 The learned Belgian Mason
would be nearer the mark by adding a few more ciphers to his four thousand
years.

2 In the Revue Philosophique of
1883, where he translates such gropings by atonements successifs.

3 As the above is repeated
from memory. it does not claim to be quoted with verbal exactitude, but only to
give the gist of the argument.

4 The epithet is Mr. Huxley’s.
In his lecture in Edinburgh in 1868, On the Physical Basis of Life, this great
opponent remarked that Auguste Comte’s
philosophy in practice might be compendiously described as Catholicism minus
Christianity, and antagonistic to the very essence of Science.

5 Professor of Ecclesiastical
History at the University of Brussels, in a philosophical Essay on the
religious meaning of the Unknowable.

6 A curious and rather
unfortunate word to use, since, as a translation from the Latin revelare, it
signifies diametrically the opposite of the now accepted meaning in English.
For the word to reveal or revealed is derived from the Latin revelare, to
reveil and rot to reveal, i.e., from re again or back and velare to veil, or to
hide something, from the word velum or a vail (or veil), a cover. Thus, instead
of unvailing, or revealing, Moses has truly only reveiled once more the
Egypto-Chaldean theological legends and allegories, into which, as one learned
in all the Wisdom of Egypt he had been initiated. Yet Moses was not the first
revealer or reveiler, as Ragon well observes. Thousands of years before him
Hermes was credited with veiling over the Indian mysteries to adapt them for
the land of the Pharaohs. Of course, at present there is no longer classical
authority to satisfy the orthodox philologist, but the occult authority which
maintains that originally the word revelare meant to veil once more, and hence
that revelation means the throwing a veil over a subject, a blind is positively
overwhelming

7 This is translated from the
Hebrew original. Chief-leader (Rab-Mag) meaning literally Teacher-Magician,
Master or Guru, as Daniel is shown to have been in Babylon.

8 Some Homeric heroes also
when they are said, like Laomedon, Priam’s father,
to have built cities, were in reality establishing the Mysteries and
introducing the Wisdom-Religion in foreign lands.

9 It is commanded in
Ecclesiasticus XXI, 30, not to curse Satan, lest one should forfeit his own
life. Why? Because in their permutations the Lord God, Moses, and Satan are
one. The name the Jews gave while in Babylon to their exoteric God, the
substitute for the true Deity of which they never spoke or wrote, was the
Assyrian Mosheh or Adar, the god of the scorching sun (the Lord thy God is a
consuming flame verily!) and therefore, Mosheh or Moses, shone also. In Egypt,
Typhon (Satan) the red, was identified both with the red Ass or Typhon called
Set or Seth (and worshipped by the Hittites) and the same as El (the Sun god of
the Assyrians and the Semites, or Jehovah), and with Moses, the red, also. (See
Isis Unv. Vol. II. 523-24.) For Moses was red-skinned. According to the Zohar
(Vol. I. p. 28) B’ sar d’ Mosheh
soomaq. i.e., the flesh of Moses was deep red, and the words refer to the
saying, The face of Moses was like the face of the Sun (see Qabbalah by Isaac
Myer p. 93). These three were the three aspects of the manifested God (the
substitute for Ain Suph the infinite Deity) or Nature, in its three chief
Kingdoms the Fiery or Solar, the Human or Watery, the Animal or Earthy. There
never was a Mosheh or Moses, before the Captivity and Ezra, the deep Kabalist;
and what is now Moses had another name 2,000 years before. Where are the Hebrew
scrolls before that time? Moreover, we find a corroboration of this in Dr.
Sayce’s Hibbert Lectures (1887). Adar is
the Assyrian War God or the Lord of Hosts and the same as Moloch. The Assyrian
equivalent of Mosheh (Moses) is Masu, the double or the twin, and Masu is the
title of Adar meaning also a hero. No one who reads carefully the said Lectures
from page 40 to 58, can fail to see that Jehovah, Mâsu and Adar, with several
others are permutations.